Month: July 2016

Pivigo (http://www.pivigo.com/), a data science marketplace and training provider based in London, has announced the successful closing of its funding round with investment secured from high profile consortia including Angel Academe, Craigie Capital, Dubai-based Dunamis Ventures Ltd and London Co-Investment Fund, the Mayor of London’s early stage business fund.

Angel Investment Network is delighted to have made a significant contribution to this success story through its introduction of Dunamis Ventures Ltd.

Now that they are fully funded, they are well placed “to reach a much larger audience, help connect more people with each other and work with companies to gain value from data…” as Founder and CEO, Kim Nilsson, puts it.

There’s a lot of dross on the internet. Too much of it. Too many people weighing in with half-baked, ill-founded opinions in an attempt to seem like an authority on whatever subject they’ve taken it upon themselves to spout about.

That said, the internet has gone a long way to help ‘democratise’ education; suddenly, people’s horizons have been opened up by the plethora of information available. If you’re bright and motivated, you no longer need a teacher, you can teach yourself with the web as your guide. You just have to be able to sift through garbage to find the gold.

Here I’ve attempted to do this for you. A lot of people like to offer their opinion on the subject of Angel Investing; a lot of people should be more considered. But every now and again it’s nice to get the view of a real authority with a track record in startups and in angel investing. Paul Graham started out as an entrepreneur, founding Viaweb (the first SaaS company) which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998 fora reported $49million. He then founded Y Combinator which has funded over 1000 startups since 2005, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit.

In this essay, he offers his wisdom on how to be an Angel Investor which he describes as “mysterious and complicated” at first but “turns out to be easier than…expected, and also more interesting.”

Xavier Ballester, the co-director of our brokering division, appeared on Intelligentcrowd.tv offering some pearls of wisdom to investors and entrepreneurs alike, including:

– How we evaluate startups worth working with
– Why we exchange part of our cash success fee for equity shares in our clients
– Recent exits and hot prospects including Brightnorth, Superawesome and What3Words
– How we raise money for our clients